Have You “Scottified” Your Manuscript?
Having a “Scott” in your life can offer a new perspective on your writing.
I’m currently ghostwriting and incorporating my client’s themes into his book. He’s an academic heavyweight with years of business experience, something I point out to explain that he’s not lacking in IQ points or business acumen. However, he reached out to me, because he’s incredibly busy and doesn’t always have time to fully write out his thoughts around the new concepts he wishes to share.
Early in our work together, I would send him a draft of a chapter, and then he’d expound on his concepts where I didn’t have enough depth. (Note: When ghostwriting for a subject-matter expert, the expert will always know more than the writer.) In a recent chapter, knowing that he’d written his notes in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, he added a final comment:
“Please Scottify.”
I understood what he meant by that without further discussion.
From those perhaps cryptic words, I wish to share a simple tip:
Get extra eyes on your manuscript.
When you write, you know what you mean. That’s why you wrote what you wrote. But the more important question is: Will your reader get what you mean?
Years ago, I took an instructional design class. The teacher assigned me to write instructions on how to set a mousetrap, the old-fashioned type with a wooden base, metal spring, latch, and doohickey where you put the bait. No, doohickey isn’t the proper name of where a person places the bait. And that’s one of my points. The first thing I had to do was create a diagram and label the parts of the trap. Otherwise, the reader might confuse one doohickey for another, and then another “thingy” might snap down on their fingers. The test of my writing instructions involved another student reading and following what I wrote. If at any time the other student didn’t feel like she could set the trap safely based on the instructions I’d written, the professor asked that she raise her hand.
Lucky me. My instructions were so poorly written that my “How to Set a Mousetrap” served as an example for the entire class! The teacher gave each student their own mousetrap and told them to follow my instructions to see where I’d gone wrong. (I should mention I was in my 30s, and my fellow students were also new instructional designers—all of us adults.)
Then the class gave me feedback for the next 30 minutes. An event that wasn’t great for my self-esteem (I’ve since recovered) turned out to impart a phenomenal lesson to me about writing with clarity.
Back to Scottify. Fortunately for you, you don’t need “Scott” to get feedback on what you’ve written. You can ask a well-read friend named Joan (Joanify), Stanley (Stanlefy), Chris (Chrisify), and so on to read your manuscript and see if it passes the clarity test:
Does it make sense as it is written?
Does it feel like something’s missing?
Does it feel like it shares too much detail?
Is it interesting?
Does the sentence structure work?
Are there any obvious grammatical issues?
Obviously, a professional editor will pick up on more than just a friend who’s willing to give you feedback. But sharing your writing with someone else does a couple of things for you. First, it helps you practice soliciting, receiving, and responding to feedback without getting defensive or eating a pint of ice cream as you cry while binge-watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island. If you’re writing with the intention of finding a publisher, you’re going to need to get used to feedback. Second, sharing your writing with someone else builds your discernment. Not all feedback is helpful or even accurate. With practice, you’ll learn which comments to act on and which to ignore.
And, of course, if you’d like to SpiritusBooks-ify your manuscript, just reach out.
Happy writing!
